Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

The third period of Greek religion may conveniently include the fifth century and that part of the fourth that ends with the downfall of the system of civic autonomy at the battle of Chaironeia. For the history of Greek religion as of Greek culture, it is of the highest interest, being the richest in respect of religious monuments and literature and the most forceful and momentous in regard to the influences at work. In the sphere of external history it witnessed such world-crises as the struggle of Hellenism against barbarism, the rise and fall of the Imperial City-State, and the emergence of Macedon as a world-power; in the sphere of culture it witnessed the culmination of the greatest art of the world, the bloom and maturity of the Attic drama and Pindar’s lyric, the diffusion of education and the spirit of enquiry through the activity of the Sophists, and the higher development of philosophy and science. To show how the religious practice and theory of the higher and lower members of Hellenic society were affected by the great events and achievements of this greatest period of human history is a necessary but a difficult task.

A further religious consequence of these great events was the stimulus given to hero-worship; Gelo, the victor at Himera, and some of the Hellenes who fell at Thermopylæ, Marathon and Platæa received heroic honours. This ‘heroising’ of the recently defunct had its moral value as a strong stimulus to patriotism, when they had died in the service of their country; and though it was degraded in the fifth century to the exaltation of the useless athlete, yet it must be reckoned among the life-forces of later polytheism and as a momentous factor of higher religious history.

Leaving aside this special question, we find a certain general resemblance in the religious view of these earlier poets of the fifth century. All three preach the supremacy of Zeus, his omnipotence and perfect justice, while Sophocles lays stress on his mercy. The effect of this poetic message was probably great and certainly timely; for the growing power and frequency of hero-cult, which Pindar himself and the dramatists indirectly encouraged, was a danger to the higher religion; and the backward and less cultured Hellenes were doubtless liable to the propensity of the savage mind to prefer the worship of the local daimon to that of the high God. Against such degeneracy the works of the greatest fifth-century poets, like the masterpiece of the greatest fifth-century sculptor, served at least as an enduring protest in Hellas.

And it would be of interest to consider how far the sculptor, in regard to the general conception of his mighty theme and in the choice of mystic bywork whereby he made it articulate, drew certain suggestions from the poetry of Æschylus.

The Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus expresses indeed a view of Zeus that conflicts with the higher religious thought of the poet. But Æschylus has here taken up a crude story that he cannot wholly moralise. On the other hand, his handling of the idea of the curse in the house of Pelops is not worked out on the lines of mechanical fatalism; one is made to feel it as a spiritual atmosphere which engenders a bias towards evil, but does not overpower the freedom of the individual.

Pindar’s freedom and sense of irresponsibility in regard to myths has a certain value in that it shows that the futilities and improprieties of mythology—the “unhappy stories of bards”—were not necessarily a burden on the stronger religious minds of Hellas, and that they could be greatly excised from the polytheism without endangering the popular worship and faith, which in the main was independent of them.

As for the two dramatists, his contemporaries, mythology was their public business, and they accepted it genially because they were not, in the first place, moral teachers, but dramatists; it did not therefore occur to them to protest or violently to reform. But they might select, discard and reshape; they could take the great legends of the past, legends of Thebes, the story of the Niobids, of Prometheus, the death of Ajax, all of them irreconcilable in parts with higher morality and religion, and invest them with as much morality as the tradition admitted. This they did with force and subtlety. And generally the moral spirit and imagination of Æschylus and Sophocles must be counted among the spiritual facts of this period with which the history of Greek ethics and religion must deal. Doubtless the older and robuster poet was the stronger moral and religious force; his protests against the non-moral doctrine of Nemesis, his profound utterances concerning moral responsibility and the moral continuity that links our lives and actions, his discovery that suffering brings moral wisdom—these are landmarks in the ethical story of Greece; while with Sophocles the conviction is no less deep of the eternity and divinity of the moral law.

They were the last spokesmen of a civic-imperial system with a civic religion and morality that had not yet passed its zenith.

The immoral elements in Greek mythology, which have been constantly reprobated by ancient and modern writers, have often blinded them to the fact that Greek religion in its forms of worship and sacred formulæ was mainly pure and refined. The stories about the Gods, often of the type natural to savage folklore, did not constitute ancient religion; and they were the less able to choke the growth of a higher ethical-religious spirit in that they were not enshrined in sacred books that could speak with authority to the people. Yet we have not infrequent proofs in Greek literature, notably in Plato’s Euthyphron, that they might exercise at times an immoral influence on men’s conduct. Meantime the educational movement in the sixth and fifth centuries had awakened men’s minds to the importance of the moral question in literature. And the protests of Euripides are developed by Plato in his scheme of education in the Republic, and the same point of view prompts him to his puritanical legislation against poets. Such moral movements in the polytheistic societies of Greece are interesting to mark, though their effect is often difficult to estimate. The new puritanical spirit had probably a wholesome influence on the more cultured minds; it had little influence on the mass of the people, nor does the later poetry of the Hellenistic period show much trace of it.

There is much indeed in the sententious poetry of Euripides that might have elevated and cleared the religious thoughts of his age; but it is doubtful if his ultimate conception of Godhead, as it tends towards pantheism, could have been reconciled with the anthropomorphic polytheism of the people or if those most conversant with his tone and inspired by his spirit could have remained long in sympathy with orthodoxy. And there is an instinct in Euripides which enhances his value for the modern man, but which was to be subversive in the longrun of the old civic religion, namely, the humanitarian or cosmopolitan instinct; that which allowed him to sympathise with Trojans, women, children and slaves, which inspired him with the beautiful thought that “the whole earth is the good man’s fatherland,” which also prompted him to despise the life of civic duty and activity and to recommend, as Aristotle does, the secluded and contemplative life. The further development of this cosmopolitan spirit and its effect on the old civic religion will be noted below.

It has been necessary to dwell so long on Euripides, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because owing to the vogue that he won in his lifetime and that was greatly to increase after his death, he more than any other of the great men of letters must be regarded as the populariser of the new enlightenment.

We may believe, then, that this higher religious ethic had a certain elevating influence on the popular imagination. The question of immediate interest is whether we can trace any effects of this in actual worship. Did the new enlightenment, for instance, lead to the abolition or reform of cruel or impure or absurd forms of ritual?

Strength of the traditional religion in the fifth century.—The question naturally occurs—were the mass of the citizens touched at all in their inward theory of things by the spirit of modernism which breathed from Ionia and inspired the sophists? The culture that was the stock-in-trade of the latter was only offered to those who could pay; and upon these the poorer Athenian looked askance. He heard of it at first with a dislike that might become dangerous. Fanaticism, as we are familiar with it in the pages of European and Semitic history, was happily alien to the Greek temperament. But the banishment of Anaxagoras and Protagoras, and the execution of Sokrates by the city that was to become the schoolmistress of Greece, might seem to savour somewhat of this temper of mind. These acts, indeed, were not inspired solely by religious feelings; but they are clear proofs that the polytheism was by no means moribund and could be dangerous in its own defence. Nothing is more erroneous than the view which is sometimes expressed, that the popular devotion to the old religion was abating and its divine personalities and forms losing life and value towards the close of the fifth century. In their dark days the Athenians bided truer to their old faith than did Rome in her time of terror. We do not find a prostrate Athens turning desperately for aid to alien Oriental cults. We hear indeed of the beginnings of Adonis-cult in the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, the first ripple of a wave of Orientalism that was to surge westward later. But this feminine excess was unauthorised, and Aristophanes hates it and mocks at it. And the shallow view mentioned above would be sufficiently refuted by his comedy of ‘the Clouds,’ in which he, the greatest literary genius of his time, poses as the champion of the reaction against modernism. It is refuted also by other incidents in Athenian history that fall within the last decades of this century; for the rage of the people at the mutilation of the Hermai, at the supposed insult to the Eleusinian mysteries, at the neglect of the dead after the battle of Arginousai, may be evidence of morbid religiosity, and is surely inconsistent with a general prevalence of scepticism. In these episodes the whole people reveal a passionate attachment to their holy mysteries, to their quaint phallic Herme-images on which the luck and the life of the State depended, to the duties of the loving tendance of the dead. Even their animistic beliefs concerning the common phenomena of the physical world had not yet been extirpated or purged by the physical philosophy of Ionia; for according to Plato it was still a dangerous paradox, which his Sokrates disclaims before the jury, to maintain with Anaxagoras that the Sun and the Moon were merely material bodies and not in themselves divine. Intellectually Nikias appears inferior to Homer’s Hektor. It was Athens that produced in the fourth century the ‘superstitious man’ of Theophrastos; but it is right to bear in mind that she also produced the man who could so genially and tolerantly expose that character.

The history of Greek religion, then, must reckon with Attic comedy as among the possible causes of religious corruption and decay; but at the worst this is only one side of the picture, for the fragments of the comedies of Menander, as will be shown, contain many a striking expression of the higher religious spirit and advanced ethical sentiment.

Spread of Asklepios-worship.—Another event of importance is the diffusion of the cult of Asklepios and the growing influence on the Hellenic mind of this once obscure hero or earth-daimon of the Thessalian Trikka. It was thence that sometime probably in the sixth century he had migrated to Epidauros, where his power expanded through his union with Apollo. His cult-settlement in Kos was connected with the Epidaurian; and already in the fifth century the Asclepieion of this favoured island had reared the great Hippokrates and was thus the cradle of the later medical science of Europe. Towards the close of this century Asklepios and his daughters came even from Epidauros to Athens, and according to a well-founded tradition the poet Sophocles was his first apostle; in the next generation we find the Athenian state regulating his worship, which was soon to conquer the whole Hellenic world. And in the survey of the Hellenistic age it must be reckoned with as one of the main religious forces of later Hellenism. We may note in passing a striking divergence between the European spirit of Hellenic religion and the Oriental spirit of Mesopotamia: the Babylonian God practises magic, the Hellenic Asklepios, though he worked miracles enough, came in a later day at least to foster science, and even his cases at Epidauros were not all merely of the Lourdes type.

Plato’s attitude towards the popular religion.—A consecutive history of Greek religious thought as embodied in the surviving writings or records of the philosophic schools of Hellas is far too large a subject even to be adumbrated here. And a general survey of the religion can only notice shortly the leading thinkers whose works there is reason to suppose had popular vogue and lasting influence upon the religious world.

The later sects which attached themselves to his name or to his school were deeply interested in religious speculation, which degenerates at last into the mystic superstition of Neoplatonism. Therefore, as the work of Aristotle belongs to the history of European science, so the philosophy of Plato concerns the later history, both of pre-Christian and Christian religious thought. To estimate exactly how his influence worked on the better popular mind in the centuries before Christ is impossible. But we may naturally and with probability surmise that he contributed much to the diffusion of the belief in the spiritual nature and perfection of God, to the extirpation of the crude notions of divine vindictiveness and jealousy, to the interpretation of the external world in terms of mind and spirit as against any materialistic expression, to the acceptance of the belief in the divinity of the human soul and its affinity with God and in the importance of its posthumous life, which was partly conditioned by the attainment of purity. These latter ideas constitute the faith of the Orphic sects, from whom Plato may have silently borrowed them. But whether through Plato or the thiasoi many of them came to appeal strongly to the popular mind of later Hellas.

Religious art in the fourth century.—Our general survey is now approaching that period of world-change brought about by the rise of Macedon. But before leaving the scene of the free City-State, we should remember to estimate the religious work done by the great fourth-century masters of sculpture before the power of Alexander reached its zenith. The fiery imagination of Skopas found plastic types for the forms of Dionysos and his thiasos, and his work rivalled at least, if it did not surpass, in inspiration of tumultuous life the masterpieces of the older Attic vase-painters noticed above. Praxiteles, the master of the gentler moods of the soul, in the religious sphere consummated the types of Aphrodite and Demeter; the almost perfect embodiment of the latter goddess, the Cnidian Demeter of the British Museum, a work of his school, combines something of the tearful expression of the Madre Dolorosa with the blitheness of the Corn-Goddess. We are conscious indeed of a change in the representation of divinity. The works of this later generation have lost the majesty and awe, the σεμνότης, as the Greeks called it, of the fifth-century art; nor can the Greek states command any longer the creation of the chryselephantine colossal statues of temple-worship. In these later types, though still divine, there is more infusion of human passion, of the personal experience, the struggles and yearning of the individual soul. Anthropomorphism is pursuing its path, and though still fertile in works of high spiritual value, may come to weary and weaken the religious sense.